In a bid to provide a unified platform for scalable access to Twitter data to its developer community, the micro-blogging platform has introduced premium APIs (application programming interfaces).

The Twitter app icon. Reuters

The new premium APIs bring the reliability and stability of Twitter's enterprise APIs to its broader developer ecosystem for the first time.

They include a clear upgrade path that scales access and price to fit the developer's needs.

"We've built these new products to enable innovation a" whether you're just getting started and building a proof of concept, or are an established company experimenting with new products and ideas," Adam Tornes, Data Product Management at Twitter, said in a blog post late 14 November.

Earlier, the developer platform provided two types of access to Twitter data: Standard (free and public) APIs and enterprise APIs (Gnip) which deliver real-time and historical data to power businesses at scale.

"Launching today in public beta, our first premium offering is the Search Tweets API, which provides access to the past 30 days of Twitter data.

"Soon, we'll add an additional endpoint that will enable access to the full history of Twitter data," Tornes added.

Twitter also introduced a new self-serve developer portal that gives the developers more transparent access to their data usage.